Docs are presales. If they’re thin or hidden, your saas website is unfinished. In saas website design, docs and changelog are part of the product, not the footer.
Here’s a simple truth most “marketing” Saas websites ignore: high‑intent visitors don’t believe headlines — they believe documentation. If I’m a CTO, a staff engineer, or a security‑minded buyer, I will glance at your homepage and then click straight to Docs, API, or Changelog. That’s the real tour. If those pages are thin, dated or hidden, your “website” is unfinished.
This is what grown-up saas website design looks like. It’s a plea for product truth. Great saas website design treats docs and the changelog as first‑class citizens: discoverable from the homepage, written for presales as much as for support, and kept alive with a steady drumbeat of visible progress.
If your current saas website design agency can’t talk about documentation strategy, you’ve hired decorators. Nothing wrong with decorators — unless you want sign‑ups and sales.
Docs are Saas Website presales
Serious buyers skim the homepage, then judge you in docs. Docs are where serious visitors check three things:
What it does (for real).
Capabilities with enough detail to be credible. Not “AI‑powered”, but endpoints, limits, and examples.
Where it breaks.
Quotas, timeouts, rate limits, data residency, supported browsers, language SDKs, and “we don’t do X yet”. Honesty converts.
How long it will take.
The “first hour” test: is there a copy‑paste quick start that runs without a committee meeting?
If the homepage is your pitch, docs are your proof. Treat them like presales content, not just a dusty reference for after sign‑up.
Write docs for buyers first
If a prospect can’t get to ‘first run’ in five minutes, they won’t. You don’t need a novel; you need a path. Make sure a prospective buyer can answer, in one sitting:
- Concepts:
Plain‑English overviews (what this is and where it fits). No poetry. - Quick starts:
One page per common job‑to‑be‑done with copy‑paste snippets.
Works in five minutes or you don’t publish it.
No poetry.
No ceremony.
It must run. - Reference:
The full spec, searchable.
Don’t hide it.
Don’t bloat it. - Limits & latency:
Numbers you can live with in public.
If you can’t show them, the problem isn’t the docs. - Security & data:
Residency, retention, permissions, audit, SOC/ISO status, breach process.
A short page that answers 80% of the questionnaire. If it’s a PDF, it’s already out of date.
Changelog = proof you ship in saas website design
No updates, no trust; vague updates, no credibility.
A good changelog tells buyers two things:
We ship. Regularly, visibly, meaningfully.
We’re safe to bet on. Fixes, not just features; clarity, not spin.
Make it readable:
- Cadence: weekly or fortnightly is plenty. Monthly is fine if it’s solid.
- Format: terse entries with tags (feature, fix, perf, docs) and dates that aren’t a lie.
- Links: from each entry to docs or a short demo link. If I can’t click, I won’t believe you.
- Homepage surface: a “What shipped this month” strip below the fold with three items, then a link to the full feed.
- Add: “Last updated: {month} {year}” label—visible from the homepage.
Things to avoid:
- Novel‑length posts. Keep the poetry for somewhere else.
- Vanity items. “Updated brand colours” is not news. Neither is “improved experience”.
- Empty promises. “Coming soon” is how you teach prospects not to trust you.
Put grown‑up links where grown‑ups look
Hide docs, pricing, security, changelog = hide the product.
If your docs link is tiny, grey, or buried in the footer, you’re signalling that the product can’t bear scrutiny.
Put Docs, Pricing, Security and Changelog in the main nav or one click away from it. On mobile, don’t hide them under six layers of hamburger. They belong in the top-level nav-on mobile too.
On the page itself, keep a persistent right‑rail or sticky sub‑nav. People doing real work don’t want to scroll‑hunt.
Show proof blocks, not adjectives
One code example, one real metric, one uptime link beats three paragraphs.
You don’t need to paste the entire reference into the homepage. You do need small, honest blocks that connect the promise to the proof:
- A single code example that actually runs (curl, JS, whatever your ICP lives in).
- A tiny status/uptime badge with a link to history. Not a veneer; a real status page.
- One numbers card with a thing that matters (median latency, records processed per minute, whatever your product’s physics are).
- A short “Works with” list that reflects the real integrations, not aspirational logos.
These blocks do two jobs: they reassure technical buyers, and they stop you writing another paragraph of vague adjectives.
Someone owns this or it dies
Ownership, cadence, and a single source of truth—or entropy wins. Someone owns this. Ideally not “whoever has time”.
- One style guide. Short. Standardise headings, tone, examples and code fences.
- One source of truth. If the app and the docs disagree, decide which wins and fix the other. Quickly.
- A review loop. Product > Docs > Eng > Security, with a max 48‑hour SLA for sign‑off.
- Metrics: page views, time to first success (from quick starts), and the boring one no one tracks: doc‑assisted conversions (sessions that touched docs before sign‑up or demo).
- Cadence: a monthly docs tidy and a quarterly “kill or consolidate” pass. Dead pages are worse than no pages.
Kill these
If you see any of this, fix it before fonts.
- API reference with no story. I can’t sell endpoints to my CFO.
- Glossy site, starved docs. Feels like a brochure, behaves like a trap.
- Changelog theatre. Ten posts about minor UI tweaks, silence on the thing everyone’s waiting for.
- Security page as a PDF. If I have to download it, it’s already out of date.
- “Docs coming soon.” So are your customers.
CEO/CTO quick check
If you can’t tick 6 of 8, your next ‘website project’ is a docs project.
- Docs are in the top‑level nav and load fast on mobile
- There’s a Quick Start that runs in five minutes (really)
- Limits, latency, quotas and data residency are public
- A one‑page Security summary exists and answers 80% of common questions
- The Changelog has entries from this month (with links)
- The homepage has one live code snippet + a real status link
- We track doc‑assisted conversions and actually look at them
- Someone owns docs; there’s a cadence; old pages get deleted
If you can tick most of that, your site already feels more credible than half the market.
If your docs are starving while you plan a rebrand, fix the truth first.
I build SaaS websites that tell the truth; positioning on the front, proof underneath.
I build websites that tell the truth: positioning on the front, proof just beneath it, and the product story stitched through the docs.
That’s what grown‑up saas website design looks like.
If your current plan involves a full rebrand but the docs are starving, fix the docs first.
If your agency rolls their eyes at this, find one that won’t — or ask for help. I’m not hard to find.